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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

when absolutism was later overthrown: in 1720 and 1723 they were staunch for the king’s prerogative.¹¹⁰ But though their support by that time madę no difference, that did not mean that the Brahes and the Bondes, the de la Gardies, Horns and Leijonhufvuds, could ever recover the position they had lost. Charles’s curbing of the magnate class proved a permanent achievement. His political system might suffer shipwreck, but the shift in the balance of social forces for which he was responsible could not be upset.

The reduktion was, no doubt, a measure designed to bring to book landowners who had used the king’s necessities to drive a hard bargain with him, and perhaps to cheat him afterwards; and it uncovered and rectified much long-standing abuse and downright swindling. But it was pursued with cruel rigour against innocent heirs, unlucky spouses, and unwitting pur-chasers, and often the crown’s rights meant the subject’s wrong. Perhaps it may be not unaptly compared with the hard things that happened to nobles and office-buyers in France, who might on occasion find themselves obliged to repurchase at a higher price, or at least to pay a swingeing contribution. For indeed, alienations in Sweden and sales of offices in France were essentially the same type of finance: in each case the king was in fact raising a loan, the interest being secured either on the revenues of the alienated lands, or on the salary attached to the office; and in each case unspecified benefits, of a social or prestigious kind, sent up the price paid by the buyer. From this point of view the reduktion can be seen as a retroactive conversion, or as a partial and selective repudiation, or (in some cases) as a cali on shares which had not been fully paid up at the time of issue. It did undoubtedly cause much hard-ship; but it did not as a rule bring ruin: a timely bankruptcy, a discreet renunciation of an overburdened inheritance, a separatio bonorum for one’s wife, an agreed composition with the crown, often on the basis of leasing the land which formerly they had owned-saved something for most of the victims.^m The reduktion itself resulted as a rule only in the loss of outlying estates: the ancestral seats were usually preserved.¹¹² What brought real ruin was not the reduktion but the sentences passed upon the Regents and the rad, whereby they were obliged to make restitution of enormous sums which (it was alleged)

CHARLES XI

had been lost to the crown by their negligence or misgovern-ment. It was the combination of these crushing claims with the ordinary processes of the reduktion which broke the fortunes of the great magnates, and reduced Magnus de la Gardie, whose income in 1679 had been equal to one-twentieth of the revenues of the crown,¹¹³ to living on royal bounty ten years later - though even so, it was not de la Gardie, but his faithful archivist, who actually starved to death.¹¹⁴ Three-quarters of a century later some of the great families had not yet recovered: J. G. Oxenstierna, that poetic if spotty youth, was driven to scrape a living as a clerk to the ńksdag, and his old aunts down in Smaland were typical specimens of the reduced gentlewoman.¹¹⁵

Nevertheless, the reduktion had important effects upon the generał position of the nobility as a landowning class. The territorial counties and baronies vanished, never to return. No further manors (satesgardar), with their special fiscal privileges, might now be created; and ‘noble’ land was for ever frozen. The land-allotment system for the army, and the loss of outlying estates, seriously diminished the available labour force at the nobility’s disposal, and this remained true despite legisla-tion designed to redress the position.¹¹⁶ Above all, the nobility’s loss of so much of their land went far to deliver the peasantry from the very real threat of social degradation and political extinction which had been hanging over it for half a century. From the king’s point of view this was a by-product and a side-issue, by no means one of the main considerations that had prompted him to act. But, whether intended or not, it was of enormous significance. When the reduktion was complete, the number of peasants who were either yeomen farmers or crown tenants had doubled, while the number of peasants of the nobility had proportionately declined.¹¹⁷ Rural society, which had seemed doomed to sink into the alien serfage of eastern Europę or the hooeri of Denmark, had been violently wrenched back into traditional Swedish patterns. The freedom of the peasant would never be threatened again; and in the century that followed his frugality and thrift would enable him to add acre to acre, at the expense not only of the nobility but of the crown.¹¹⁸

Meanwhile, the king was once morę a great landowner: 249